London to Brighton
by kates1304
Summary: Jonny and Jac. A meeting on a train and an awkward reunion. One shot set around 2017.


**London to Brighton**

She stands on the concourse and looks up at the Departures board. It is 5.45 in the morning. Anybody with any sense would still be in bed. A glance to her left tells her that her travelling companion agrees. He is sitting on top of the suitcase with a belligerent expression on his face, his big blue eyes droopy with sleep, his thumb forced defiantly into his mouth. He knows that his mother thinks that he is too old to suck his thumb and she knows that he only does it when he wants to spite her. She doesn't tell him to stop it because she is too tired and because she knows that he is right. He should be asleep in his Thomas the Tank bedroom, not sitting in a station in the middle of December, waiting for his mother to decide where they are going. It is not his fault that her default setting is to run away and drag him along with her. Not that he knew anything about it last time. Four years ago when she took off she knew nothing of the little souvenir that she was carrying with her. All she knew was that she had been where she was too long. A better offer had come along just when she needed it the most and she had grabbed it with both hands. By the time she discovered that she was expecting a child it was too late. She had left the past behind her. She didn't want to go back and even if she had, a quick telephone call to an old friend told her that if she did go back then he wouldn't be waiting for her. He had moved on with almost indecent haste. He had a new girlfriend, and a family of his own on the way. He didn't need her and his son crashing back into his life, and in any case she had found somebody new who more than filled his place. Her son had a father and what Jonny didn't know would never hurt him.

**ooooo**

He wakes up and for a couple of seconds he is disorientated. For one thing he is sleeping on the sofa. For another, there is a smashed wineglass on the floor in the kitchen that hasn't been cleaned up. As he looks around him and tries to piece together the events of the previous evening it slowly comes back to him. He remembers the argument first. He remembers her accusing him of an affair, and he remembers that he hadn't been able to deny it. Instead he'd told her that it hadn't really been an affair. It was a drunken fumble, a kiss after the Christmas party. It was nothing. She hadn't seen the distinction, which, after what she'd done with his father, was a bit rich really. He'd told her as much, which was when she'd thrown the wine glasses at his head. She'd asked him if he was going to drag that up in every single argument they had. He'd said that yes, he probably was, and that he was going to bed. His father had once told him that the secret of a long and happy marriage was not going to bed on an argument. That doesn't work with her though, it never has done. When she gets into a state the best thing to do is to leave her and deal with it in the morning, which was why he chose to spend the night on the sofa. Anyway, after the way things ended between his parents it will be a cold day in hell before he takes marital advice from his father. Wearily he pads upstairs, creeping past the boy's bedroom because he wants to iron things out with her before their sons wake up and sense the atmosphere. The last thing he wants is to be called into school again because Harry has been fighting or Charlie is withdrawn, both boys reacting to the difficulties at home in the only way they know. The empty bed surprises him when he goes into the bedroom. She is never up before him. Never up at all at this hour. Then he spots the note and his world stops turning.

'Dad, what's going on?' it is Harry's voice that brings him out of his reverie, the little boy woken by the smashing of the glass of water that he has sent crashing to the ground. 'Where's Charlie?'

'I…' he starts but he doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know how to begin to explain to his son, who in seven years has already been through so much, that his brother and the woman who has been a mother to him for as long as he can remember have gone.

**ooooo**

He practically skips down the platform. It has been a long time in coming but finally he is going home. Not that he has ever actually lived in the place where he is going but that doesn't matter. She is there, and their girls, and therefore whether or not it is familiar, it is definitely home. It had broken his heart to let them go ahead but with hindsight it was the right decision. The girls needed to settle into the house before starting nursery and Mo had her job on the table even though he was struggling to find one himself. It made sense for her to take the kids and go to Brighton while he stayed in Holby so that he carried on earning, but that doesn't change the fact that the six months he spent in Sacha's spare room have been the longest of his life. Thanks to their conflicting shift patterns he hasn't even seen them every weekend. He has seen them maybe eight times since the move and no amount of SKYPE video calling could ever fill the gaping hole in his life that their absence created. But now it doesn't matter any more. He has got a job at a private hospital in Hove and he is coming home to them. He knows that they will be there to meet him at the station and he cannot wait to put his arms around them.

He doesn't notice the woman who is arguing with her child at first. He is too busy thinking about Mo and the girls to notice the woman struggling to get the protesting child and a large suitcase onto the train, but when he does he remembers his manners and stops to help. As she glances up to thank him and their eyes meet, he wishes that he'd carried on walking. It's not that he has any particular antipathy towards her, not anymore. It's just that she complicates things because even when she just crosses his mind he finds himself stopping and wondering what his life would have been like if things had been different between them. He loves Mo, really he does, but even she would accept that if Jac would have had him then she wouldn't have had a look in. With Mo there is love and affection but there has never been the raw, animal passion that there was with Jac. Coming face to face with her makes him realise just how much he's missed that.

'Jonny' the word comes out in a gasp and is almost drowned out by a passenger announcement.

'Jac' he replies, staring at her, wondering whether he should stay and talk or whether she'd rather he went and found his seat. As ever he has absolutely no clue what she wants him to do, and she is giving nothing away.

'What are you…'

'Doing here? Travelling to Brighton, obviously' he tells her. He doesn't tell her about Mo, or that they have moved there because they want their kids to grow up by the sea rather than in Holby's urban sprawl. He doesn't want her to know anything about him and he certainly doesn't want to find out that she too lives in Brighton and to have to start socialising with her. It would be too weird.

'Where is Mo?' she asks, and it dawns on him that she knows. Over the years he's wondered from time to time whether she's heard that he's married, and whether she even cares. Now he knows. He wonders whether she also knows about the kids and whether that news hurt her the way that the fact that she's got a son hurts him, just a little. He loves his girls, more than anything else in the world, but they'll never replace the child that he and Jac lost. He wouldn't want them to.

'She's already there. She went ahead…' he trails off. He wants her to know as little as possible about his life. Too much water has passed under the bridge for them to ever be friends. He wants to end this excruciating exchange as soon as possible and forget all about her. And yet he can't resist asking: 'What about Joseph' even though it is picking at his own open wound.

'He's…' she trails off 'It's complicated'

'I see' he replies tersely. He doesn't really, nor does he want to. One of the things that he loves about Mo is that she is so blissfully uncomplicated. He doesn't want Jac coming along making everything messy, even if it's just by telling him about whatever drama she is currently embroiled in.

'We're going on holidays' the little boy tells him cheerfully, cutting through the awkwardness with his childish chatter 'To the beach. We're going to get Harry some rock!'

'That's nice' he replies, forcing a smile onto his face because no matter how much he doesn't want to see Jac, he's not going to start being nasty to children. Anyway, the kid is cute in a kind of precocious way. No surprise really: with Joseph Byrne for a father the poor child has probably been being publicly educated since he was three months old.

'Harry is my brother. He likes trains!'

'Charlie' Jac hisses. She looks embarrassed, although he doesn't really understand why because the kid is doing nothing wrong. 'What have I told you about talking to strangers'

'He's not a stranger, mummy. You said his name!' the little boy points out with impeccable three year old logic. 'I'm going to have ice cream at the beach'

'I'm sure you are' he tells the child, privately wondering why on earth Jac is taking her son to the seaside in the middle of December. 'It's nice to see you again Jac but the train's about to go. I should probably find my seat before somebody else takes it' he tells her. He turns away from her, walking a couple of paces until he finds his seat, which is not far away. Just bloody typical to get a seat near the toilet, he thinks to himself, thankful that at least the journey is only an hour long. Then he turns back and sees her standing behind him and realisation slowly dawns on him.

'Is there any chance that you're not 27 C and D?' he asks wearily, but he already knows the answer.

'Sorry' she sighs. From the look on her face he can see that she is about as happy as he is about it, and he suspects that if she didn't have a child then she would stand for the duration of the journey rather than sit next to him. It occurs to him to do just that but he doesn't see why he should. He is happy to put his earphones in, read his book and pretend that she doesn't exist. As far as he is concerned, she can do the same.

**ooooo**

She stares out of the window and curses her own misfortune. What are the chances, she wonders, of the train that she picked totally at random being the exact same train that he is travelling on? And then, to have the bad luck to be seated next to him on a train so packed that she can't even switch seats. And worse still, the child who has been giving her silent treatment for well over an hour has suddenly found his voice again. She can see that Jonny wants to read his book – Harry Potter, she notes wryly, not really surprised to see that he still hasn't grown up – but Charlie wants to speak to him. The only upside that she can find to her son's endless stream of consciousness about trains, ice cream, the beach and his brother is that if Charlie is talking then it means that she doesn't have to. She doesn't want to talk to Jonny. She is afraid that if she does then she'll tell him the whole sorry story about her breakup with Joseph and she doesn't want to do that. She doesn't want to talk about it, and certainly not with him of all people. She is also aware that the longer she spends with Jonny the more likely he is to do the maths and work out that she must have fallen pregnant pretty quickly after leaving Holby. She doesn't want him to work that out because from there it isn't a massive leap to remembering the night of teary, emotional, passionate sex that they'd had the night before she left. If he does that and then he looks at her son and sees what she sees every single time that she looks into the little boy's eyes then he will know and the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

'Charlie, put your coat on' suddenly she is on her feet. She doesn't know what she is doing, or where she is going to go, but she knows that they are only a couple of minutes outside a station and that she needs to get off. For everybody's sake she cannot run the risk of Jonny working out that he's got a son.

'Jac, what are you doing?' Jonny asks but she doesn't reply. She hoists Charlie onto her hip, despite the fact that he is much too heavy to carry, and manages to manoeuvre him and the big case onto the platform. As the train pulls away she wonders where the hell she is going to go now and then as if in answer to her prayers the voice over the tannoy says:

'The next train from platform four is for London Gatwick' and she realises that she can go anywhere she wants to.

**ooooo**

As the train pulls away he looks back at Jac and the boy and he wonders what the hell has gotten into her. The child is waving at him, too young to realise that his new friend is somebody that his mother wants so badly not to see that she is willing to strand herself in East Croydon to avoid him. As he waves back he looks into the boy's eyes and suddenly he knows why Jac was so desperate to get off the train. He remembers that night together when she had known that she was going to go to London and make a life with Joseph, and yet she'd come to his flat anyway. For the first, and last, time they had talked properly. About the fact that he'd lied the first time they'd met: about her fling with Sean: about the pregnancy and the miscarriage and how much it hurt him that she'd shut him out. They'd had sex, that was sort of inevitable whenever they spent time together and drank a lot of alcohol, and for a few wonderful hours he actually thought that he'd got her back. And then the next morning she had left his bed, thanked him for a nice evening and gone off with Joseph exactly as she'd planned, as if nothing had happened. She had broken his heart all over again by leaving him behind, and yet now he realises that she hadn't left him behind at all. At least not all of him. She had taken a part of him with her, he is certain of that from just looking into her son's eyes, but the train is pulling out of the station and no amount of banging on the window from him is going to get it to stop. By the time he even thinks about the emergency handle it is too late. He would be happy enough to gamble on the £250 fine for misusing it but even if he does, the same sign clearly says that the train will not stop between stations. There is no point. He gives up. He presses his head against the icy cold glass of the window and he resigns himself to the fact that he will never get them back, and then his phone rings. Mo. Excitedly prattling on about how much she and the girls are looking forward to seeing him. Even if he gets off at the next station and goes back he won't catch Jac. The next train is to Gatwick, she will be on it, and even if he goes to the airport it will be like searching for a needle in a haystack. A needle that doesn't want to be found. And he will be late for Mo. Mo who has done nothing except love him unconditionally. She deserves better than for him to let her down because of some ridiculous wild goose chase after a woman who doesn't want to be caught and a child who knows nothing about him. He cannot jeopardise his real family for that. He swallows back the lump in his throat and for her sake, he tells himself to forget that this ever happened.


End file.
